Wishes are For Fools
by Cymberleigh
Summary: Bill Turner was cursed and sent to the bottom of the ocean, a canon tied to his bootstraps, but while he was there. . what was he thinking?


Wishes are for Fools  
  
There was once a time I loved the sea, I couldn't spend many a day off of it. It was a beautiful sight the light glinting upon it, sunset creeping over the horizon until the water glittered with a surface of sparkling diamonds lit by the moon and shining with the stars. It was a mystery of things, a way of travel that lead to all manner of places. I fancied that I must have gone everywhere, birthed in every port, seen all that needed to be seen.  
  
And yet. . what I saw more rarely than land was my wife and my son. I loved. . love them, don't get me wrong, but the sea always called to me, called me back so that I could feel it's wind upon my face, to taste the salt water upon the air. Now though, I'd give anything to be at home with them, to sit perhaps in front of the fire and tell my boy about the places I've been, of course leaving out the riskier details. To climb into bed and wrap my arms about my wife and whisper how much I loved her in her ear. Words that she only heard once or twice.  
  
Wishes are for fools though, but then I suppose. . wishes should fill my every breath, if I had any left in me. Ah too breathe. . to breathe Air! To feel the air brushing acrossed my flesh. The heat of the summer and the cold ice that clung to my hair in the winter. There are much too many things I took for granted. I became a pirate to build up a fortune for my small family, so that we would never have to live the way I did. Never knowing the next time you were going to eat. And so I sent them all that I made, hoping that while my presence was not there, the truth that I loved them was.  
  
And then. . we caught rumor of a chest filled with Aztec gold, a curse upon it. We all laughed at that. Curses, indeed. Who believed in those anymore? We should have believed though. . the Black Pearl in itself is a curse of sorts, or the whispers and the betrayal that lingered in it's sails were. Mutiny rang in everyone's mind, the greed for more, and I was swept away in it's tide, only to be washed upon the shore of reality as we left our once captain on the island. To this day it doesn't sit well with me, what we did, leaving him there. But I am after all one man.  
  
But I exacted my own revenge after we stole the accursed treasure, spending all but one. For the curse was true, it deadened everything, our ability to taste, to feel, to enjoy. And some would say we reaped our just rewards. They do not know the hell of it, to not feel what you once loved, to not smell the sea, though you know it's there beneath you. It was as if I was walking in a world that I did not belong. Like a ghost, I lingered and still do linger, here beneath the depths.  
  
I cursed the captain, wished ill upon him, though nothing could kill us, we were immortal. The price was too much dear for that. Every man would like to live forever, but to all things there is an end, and my end will be met here, beneath the ocean, beneath the sky. They tied a cannon to my bootstraps, it might as well have been an anchor, weighing me down, dragging me to the bottom of this watery hell, and then into despair.  
  
There was once a time I loved the sea and now I wish I had never heard it's siren's call, seen it's treasures reflected in the day, and it's mysteries in dark depths at night. I have spent too much time here, down where fish are all the company that I have left.  
  
I've had time to think, and I wonder when my time will come, or would the Lord be so cruel as to never break this abhorrence of nature. Would I be here until the day that the ocean's dried up? Until the day that the world ended, everything changing around me while I remain unchanged? Even a piece of sand has the ability to transform with the help of a clam. And so I was transformed by a piece of gold, though nothing so beautiful, no I've become what used to plague my nightmares as a child, I have become death.  
  
I've often wondered how many years have gone by, and ponder upon why I have not yet gone mad. Or perhaps I have, and this is all but a nightmare. And once again I'm a fool for I wish that it were. I wonder more on how my family is. . did Will get that piece of gold? Did he hold it close to his heart and hide it like I had written for him to do so. That as long as that trinket was in his possession, my last gift to him, then Barbosa would be living in the same hell as me, getting what he deserved for leading us into temptation and into the hell that we lived. . no not lived, suffered through each day.  
  
It's night again, the ocean's are darker, though moonlight still filters down through the water. And as a cloud removed itself from the glowing orb's surface, something changed in me. My gaze moving down, I see flesh instead of bones, and I breathe in and lungs I have not had in for so long are filled. This is my end and how ironic the one thing I loved the most would be the death of me. I struggle for breath, and though my much awaited and prayed for end is near, I want only to breathe that sweet air once more As darkness fills my gaze for the last time, I have to wonder. . am I the only one meeting death in this moment? Is Barbosa and his men feeling the pain that is erupting in my chest? I can only hope so. But more importantly. .  
  
Did anyone tell my son that I was a good man? Did someone tell him that though I was a pirate, my acts of piracy were for him and his mother, for their benefit. Has he found happiness, that is if happiness can be found in this world? Then there are no thoughts, only blackness and I float away, above the oceans and above the moon, to a place where a woman's voice so much like my wife's calls my name. Bill Turner. . .it seems so long ago that I heard her speak it.  
  
There was a time I loved the ocean, and there was a time that I hated it. And now. . I have all eternity to love what I should have loved all along. 


End file.
